(I know; red flag.) “He even called me, calling me ‘Mom’ a few times,” she says.

Then, after about a week of heavy correspondence, Firefly’s boyfriend announced his son’s birthday was coming up, and suggested she send him a gift. It was pretty gratifying, she says; the son was ecstatic.

Firefly spent a lot of time on her profile, thinking she needed to be entirely honest and open if she hoped to really connect with someone.

Within 10 minutes of posting, she had a handful of virtual suitors — and one stood out.

He suggested they ditch the dating site and switch to email.

“You pretend to be a victim and string them along, try to get them to waste as much of their time, money, and resources as you can,” he says.

Mays would post any identifying details that scammers used online — from the email addresses they created to the back stories they recycled — to make them searchable. But for Mays, who co-hosts a scam-baiting podcast, “it’s also like improve comedy.” Most people aren’t turning to him for comic relief, though.

He told me that my e-mails were beautiful & that I seemed to be exactly what he was looking for in a wife.

I was so confused by this but decided not to call him even though I had his cell number.

Five years ago, he and a small team of international volunteers, including Firefly, created Scam Survivors, a hotline and information resource center for victims of online scams — mostly, as it turns out, romance scams. “With the romance scam, it could be someone who's been married for a number of years.